Trudy Monk
Trudy Anne Monk is Adrian Monk's deceased wife. Early Life Trudy Monk was born in Los Angeles in 1962, to Dwight and Marcia Ellison. She attended the Ashton Preparatory School on a scholarship and graduated valedictorian in 1977, at the age of 15. Her best friend, Arleen Cassidy, went on to become headmaster of their school. Trudy did not date very much in high school, expecting to know who the right man would be once she found him. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. She met her future husband Adrian while he was working there at the library. Adrian and Trudy married on August 8, 1990. A prolific writer, Trudy worked as a freelance reporter for several newspapers. Several of her most important stories exposed corruption and crime in San Francisco. In Adrian's words, Trudy "enjoyed poetry, was often barefoot, and kept every promise she ever made." She wrote many poems herself, and would often put one in Monk's wallet for him to find later. Monk still keeps the last one she ever wrote in his wallet. When actor David Ruskin was studying to portray Monk in an upcoming film, he asked about Trudy, and Adrian said "no one ever deserved her." Biederbeck Lawsuit and Trudy's Last Years In 1993, Trudy wrote an unflattering article about financier Dale "The Whale" Biederbeck, calling him "The Genghis Khan of world finance." Biederbeck responded by suing her for libel. Though he ultimately lost, the suit lasted a whole year, which Adrian later called the worst of her life. Adrian would find her sitting in her car, crying to herself because she didn't want Adrian to see her; the legal costs forced the Monk's to sell their first home, which Biederbeck, to spite them, bought up and turned into a warehouse for his porn collection. After this year, Adrian harbors an intense hatred for Biederbeck because of the pain he caused Trudy. Death Trudy Monk was murdered on a snowy December 14, 1997, by a bomb planted under the passenger seat of her car - 10 pounds of plastique with a magnesium charge. At the time it exploded, she was in a parking garage. Earlier that day, Adrian's brother Ambrose had asked her to run an errand to the drugstore for him, he blamed himself for her death, and his guilt led to a 7-year rift between the brothers. But Ruskin, while looking at the photos of the crime scene, suggested that she may have been meeting someone in connection with one of her stories, a possibility Monk had only briefly mentioned in the first episode (though it is not said if he examined this thoroughly). Monk's old partner, Joe Christie, said that Monk was laughing before the phone call came telling him about the bombing - the last time Monk would ever laugh in his life. Trudy lived for 20 minutes after the bomb went off. According to the coroner's inquest, her last words were "bread and butter." This was one of her favorite sayings when she and Adrian walked down the street holding hands, and had to part hands to let someone or something else pass between them. She was telling Adrian that she had to let go for now, but they would never be parted. Aftermath Trudy's parents never completely recovered from the loss of their only child. But Dwight continued with his work, while Marcia "decided to give the world another chance," and found important work as a grief counselor. The murder of his wife was (and remains) the one crime that Monk has never been able to solve. The trauma of losing her caused Monk to suffer a complete mental breakdown, so severe that he was suspended from the police department, and did not leave his house for three years. Though he made a gradual recovery, and a return to detective work, his wife's murder remained a dead end until 2004. When she was alive, Monk's phobias and psychological disorders were kept in check, and he remained a relatively functioning person, and a remarkable detective. Even after she was gone, it was love for her that trumped everything, even his heightened fears. For instance, every single thing in his apartment had to be kept at precise right angles, except the coffee table, which Trudy would often tilt to put her feet up on, so he could rest his head in her lap; thus, the exact opposite was true: he would never allow it to be centered. To solve her murder, Monk would, and has, brave anything, including several things plenty of "ordinary" people are terrified of. In 2004, when Dale Biederbeck offered Monk clues about Trudy's murder in exchange for solving a petty case, Monk took the job, from a man he hated, which included going undercover in a prison, sharing a cell with a notorious multiple murderer, and nearly being killed by a gang of neo-Nazis. In exchange for solving the case, Biederbeck gave him a pair of vital clues. The first was that Trudy, not Monk, was the intended victim of the car bomb; as he had always blamed himself for her death, Monk experienced an unexpected relief. Second, that one of the men "involved" in her death was named Warrick Tennyson and could be found in New York City. In New York, Tennyson was interrogated, and confessed to being hired to build and plant the bomb, but that someone else detonated it. He also described the man who hired him as having a distinctive, six-fingered hand. Face to face with one of his wife's murderers, Monk coldly turned off the morphine drip preventing the dying Tennyson from succumbing to horrible pain. But, thinking about what Trudy would have wanted, he turned it back on a few moments later. The pain of Trudy's loss is never far from Monk's heart. In 2005, when Monk was optimistic about his recovery and his chances for reinstatement, Natalie overheard a woman looking exactly like Trudy telling someone else that she had faked her own death to protect her family. Monk's world turned upside down when he found out, and, even though the woman was exposed as a fraud, Monk's reinstatement was denied once again, the pain of the episode having returned him "to normal." In 2007, Adrian saw a Brazilian woman whom he chased for several blocks for no apparent reason. Later, he explains that one of her eyes looked exactly like Trudy's - which, as it turned out, was because Trudy had donated a cornea that found its way to the woman. In 2008, Monk found the six-fingered man, Frank Nunn, who admitted to being hired to kill Trudy, but was killed before he could say by whom. However, after his death, papers were found in his house connecting Trudy's murder to a mysterious figure known as "The Judge." Monk believes that Biederbeck knows The Judge's identity, but so far, Biederbeck has not revealed any further information. Background Information and Notes * Trudy was played by Stellina Ruisch in the pilot episode and through the middle of the third season, though her appearances were limited to brief cameos, or appearances in photographs. * Melora Hardin replaced Ruisch in Season Three's "Mr. Monk and the Game Show," first appearing in a more extensive flashback depicting her introducting Adrian to her parents. * Hardin also portrayed Cameron, an actress masquerading as Trudy, in the episode "Mr. Monk and Mrs. Monk. * Young Trudy in "Mr. Monk and the Class Reunion" was played by Linda Newton. * There is some conflicting continuity about when Trudy and Adrian first met and married. The above history is based in part on Season Five's "Mr. Monk and the Class Reunion," which showed Adrian and Trudy meeting in college. But earlier episodes, such as "Mr. Monk Goes to the Ballgame," and "Mr. Monk and the Game Show," hold that Trudy and Monk met while he was already a detective with the SFPD, which would have occurred some years after graduation from college. Monk, Trudy Monk, Trudy Monk, Trudy Monk, Trudy